NHL commissioner Bettman happy with status quo

Teams looking for help qualifying for the NHL playoffs are not going to get it from the league any time soon, according to commissioner Gary Bettman.

Taking in Game 1 of the Western Conference quarterfinal between the St. Louis Blues and the Minnesota Wild, Bettman said the system is not broken and there is no need to fix it.

“I think the realignment has worked very, very well, when you look at how the regular season played out, it was nothing short of phenomenal. It went right down to the wire, teams with 95, 96 points not making the playoffs,” Bettman said. “The league has never been more competitive. I think we have the most competitive balance in all of sports and it’s fun to see.”

There have been questions whether the league should adopt a different points system to give more merit to a regulation win over overtime or shootout wins.

A three-point system has been debated, but the NHL does not appear interested in changing the current method of distributing points in a game.

“I think the media debates it a lot, but we don’t get a lot of negative response from the fans,” Bettman said. “When you see how the playoff races played out and the importance of every game in the regular season, there are teams that wish they had a couple of more points in October and November that they would have liked to have had down the stretch. The points system is working extraordinarily well.”

Along with keeping the points system as is, the league is also not looking at expanding the number of teams who make the post-season, which is bad news to the Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs.

The issue of perhaps adopting a play-in game as Major League Baseball does, has been bandied about in different circles, but not within the league.

“No. Why based on what you’re seeing in the regular season would you want to do that? Why would the seventh and eighth teams want to risk getting eliminated in a one-game series by the ninth and 10th teams,” Bettman said. “The way we’re set up now, maximizes the importance of the regular season. And for some of our teams, they’ve been in the playoffs for the last six weeks. All of these things, the points systems and expanding the playoffs are constantly the subject of debate, but in the final analysis, what we have going is pretty good.”

In general, Bettman likes the current state of the game and there is not a push within the league office to make drastic changes.

“It’s strong, quite strong. The fan base everywhere is engaged, exited, our TV coverage both in Canada and the United States has never been stronger,” Bettman said. “Our use of digital platforms increases by the day, our fans have never been able to connect to the game as well as they are now. We’ve never had more fans engaged than we do, whether in person, on the digital platforms or by traditional media. We think the best is still in front of us.”

The league wants to keep the focus of ​fans on the playoff matchups the action on the ice. That’s the reason it has not gone out of its way to promote Saturday’s draft lottery, which will garner plenty of interest in Edmonton and Toronto.

“It’s kind of mechanical and when we do the mechanics of it, it’s over in 10 seconds,” Bettman said. “It is what it is. The lottery is intended to create a fairer distribution of what happens with the first pick and not make it anybody’s incentive eyes to finish anywhere in particular. It wasn’t created as an event, it was created to take care of business.”